Prague

Our neighbours, the Filmores, are come; Alfred will join us at Basle, and we shall all go together to Vienna, and back by Prague" .

My father was called away before he had finished his sentence, and he left my mind resting on the word PRAGUE, with a strange sense that a new and wondrous scene was breaking upon me: a city under the broad sunshine, that seemed to me as if it were the summer sunshine of a long-past century arrested in its course--unrefreshed for ages by dews of night, or the rushing rain-cloud; scorching the dusty, weary, time-eaten grandeur of a people doomed to live on in the stale repetition of memories, like deposed and superannuated kings in their regal gold-inwoven tatters.

I had seen no picture of Prague: it lay in my mind as a mere name, with vaguely-remembered historical associations--ill-defined memories of imperial grandeur and religious wars.

I recognized the face of my friend Gordon Doyle, whom I had met in Liverpool on the day of my embarkation, when he was himself about to sail on the steamer City of Prague, on which he had urged me to accompany him.

"The steamer City of Prague, bound from Liverpool to New York, three weeks out with a broken shaft.

The sisters began to play the Battle of Prague. "Stop that d thing," George howled out in a fury from the sofa.

Her father cheated Papa, and as for her, she is never to be mentioned HERE." This was Miss Maria's return for George's rudeness about the Battle of Prague.